FreeOrion

First of all I had better say that I hope these are new suggestions as I have only just discovered FreeOrion and have not read all the posts (yet!). I grew up on Masters of Orion II and was bitterly disappointed with Masters of Orion III. It totally missed the point that the game was meant to be fun and filled with big strategic decisions. Instead it was mired down in micro-management and replaced fun with realism. I had a few thoughts about new elements that could be introduced to add new elements to gameplay, more than just expanding on existing content. I share these ideas with you now (forgive me you have had them before.)

INITIATIVE- Tactical combat was great fun in MOOII but the most annoying thing was that when two relatively evenly matched fleets met the outcome would be decided by who went first. What if we introduced something called initiative and let ships with the highest initiative scores go first? In the event of ships having the same initiative the ship to move first could then be decided at random. Base initiative could vary for ship size, be affected by race picks, leaders and research-able technologies that could either effect crews instantly or be added to the ship design (eg computers that will increase initiative by 1 for each computer added on ship).

CHANGABLE TECH TREES- Having played MOOII a lot it did not take long before you worked out exactly what technologies you wanted and which order to research them. Once these decisions were made and you had success with them you tended to repeat them every game. Introducing too much change into the tech trees would cause too much chaos, but what if every technology had a 5% chance of altering? They could alter in that they moved one up the tech tree or one down so that they were up against different technologies to select or they could disappear altogether, or perhaps be more powerful/beneficial than normal (where possible). This would not alter players overall strategy but would force them to make some different and important decision every game when it came to selecting technology.

GALACTIC AUCTIONS- In MOOII colony leaders and ship leaders offered there services to Empires for a price. What if this was taken much further? Imagine a galactic auction where leaders appeared for a certain period of time and players bid on them if they wanted them. At the end they went to the highest bidder. This could be done for technologies (both research-able ones and unique alien ones), alien artifacts that will confer a specific bonus upon a colony and even mercenary ships that will join your fleet if you are the highest bidder. This will have a big bearing on strategy. Do you spend your money on building or save for the auctions. How much are your rivals going to bid? Should you spend all your money on the good leader that came up, or save it in case a better one comes along? Should you even turn some colonies over to trade goods instead of research to ensure you are not short of money when you need it? This would add a whole new fun dimension to the game (or any space/fantasy strategy game).

Welcome to FreeOrion


Leaders are one of the features that may or may not make it into the game. But if we do have leaders, your idea is a cool twist on it.

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- ship initiative: Moo 2 has ship initiative since patch 1.31

- variable tech trees: I like the idea, but 5% per tech is not enough to make a significant difference in playing experience. But there is a way to implement much larger random effects without chaos if the tech is organized in fields like Moo 2: Each field contains about 5 – 7 techs, and 2 or 3 of them are picked at random.

Additional idea: "hypercreativity" race pick: A hypercreative race can alter reality in a way to acess all tech- even if this tech doesnt exist in the tech tree of this reality.